Fiction

*this is the second piece of speculation political fiction written with just a hint of satire written in the form of a Wikipedia article form the future. You can see the first piece here. The purpose is imagine what all this craziness from the white house might be building to while envision how peace might come out of chaos and tragedy. We should not take Trump’s idiocy or bluster lightly. When the autocrat says he is coming for you believe him! I believe we can prevent violence in the long run if we build for transformation and autonomy now*

Overview:

The Enlightened Retreat, often called the DAT Revolution, is name of the powerful social movement that led to the fall of U.S Empire in the period of beginning with the Unending March and the end of WW3. The great retreat was a direct result of the mass arrests and political show trials against socialist, communist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist organizers and artist during the Trump-Ryan political crisis of 2017-2021. Unlike the repression of the 1950’s which marginalized American communism by making it un-American, the brutality of the wave of repression in the pre-war years, combined with the deep community building in the U.S oppositional organizing lead to a mainstreaming of autonomous and transformative local organizing.

Due to fact that most political speech ended in jail time after the inauguration of President Paul Ryan following the impeachment of President Trump and resignation of Vice President Mike Pence and the economic down turn following the student loan and rental housing bubble bursting in 2018, most political dissidents went from protesting the government to building small communities of care and support. This often took the form of soup-co-ops, group housing and rapid response medical and mental health care. As housing insecurity due to loan repayments became wide spread, “take back the land” campaigns become more and more common in major Urban Areas as displaced people started squats in their own rental units.

The cultural practices of Block Parties and “Free Markets” where people shared food, music and unneeded clothes and supplies with their neighbors slowly became the mainstream as overt political speech was heavily monitored and the economic crises deepened. Eventually, larger scale cooperatives and community sourced agriculture networks started to develop as the gas shortages from the Qatar crisis lead to increased prices on food imports.

Political organizers started printing off political pamphlets and convincing CSA vendors and block party organizers to distribute them in the food and clothing giveaways at their events. As these critical connections developed, organizers would ask residents of a neighborhood to turn off their lights from 8:30-9:00pm, a tactic latter called “rolling Black outs.” The Black outs were massive acts of political disobedience that were low risks to residents but sent a clear message to government. Though they were tolerated by the local police who were still reeling from the massive Black Bloc demonstrations in Oakland, Detriot and Portland and the Afrikan blocs in Jackson, M.S and Washington D.C in 2019, it was widely believed that these small acts of wide spread solidarity, gave everyday residents the courage to take back the streets years later. Despite the increase in protests from preceding the Enlightened Retreat, the number of overt street protests went from nearly 4,000 in 2018 to 7 in 2021.

The rapid decline in street protests and the shift from digital communication to old fashion newspaper printing combined with the a disarray in the FBI and homeland security following the haphazard management by the Trump administration created the allusion of a U.S populace shocked into compliance. This allowed for a remarkable amount of cultural and spiritual organizing to happen without much confrontation by the state.

The first general strike of the defense industry in 2021, was organized by the D.C speakeasy through pamphlets at regional block parties distributed by traveling DJ’s and hip hop groups on tour. The speakeasies, or underground social clubs, where organizers meet in secret to plan campaigns and write their political pamphlets, often became the chapter hubs for the leadership of the Party of Revolution and Evolution that would grow to power after WW3.

The Call for Retreat

Most historians mark the start of the Great Retreat with the distribution of the anonymous essay “the way out is in, together” in January 2018 after the mass arrests of protestors in Portland, OR. The essay, or memo as it was called at the time, called for a “deep collective grounding in our own desire for connection, loving touch, joy and freedom that can fuel the fire we need to burn down the aspects of the system that no longer serve us.” The essay argued the personal was political and spiritual. It resonated with many by speaking to the deep alienation that neo-liberal capitalism instilled in advanced industrial societies while connecting that feeling and spiritual sense of loss to structures of oppression. Marvin Jeffries, who would later help organize the 2023 general strike famously posited that “the memo gave us language to discuss a problem we were too afraid to let ourselves feel, while showing us that we were not alone in feeling it and we were not feeling it because of our individual actions but rather a system that was producing specific conditions of pain.”

By the time President Paul Ryan began ordering the mass arrests of 2019, the essay was well known among U.S organizers. That year it was common for posters with graphic representations of the main ideas of the essay to be wheatpasted by young dissidents at the sites of disappearances of organizers or mass arrests after political demonstrations. As protests dwindled in winter of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the posters became popular decorations at church revivals, farmers markets and block parties across the country. After the re-authorization of the Patriot Act in May of 2020 made the distribution of the posters a felony, they often lost their overt political content and took on a more overly spiritual tone which ironically allowed them to resonate with aspects of the Christian community that should have been a natural base for Ryan regime.

In this same period, the new monostatic movement of young Christians was reaching its height as rising housing insecurity and gas prices mixed with erratic weather to force many people into communal living situations. As always, desperate times called for theologies of escape as well as theologies of liberation. This helped popularize a less formally religious but deeply socially engaged spirituality that spurred revivals of Judaism, mass conversions to the Baha’i faith and an increase in socially engaged practitioners of American Buddhism particularly the Order of Interbeing.

The Revolution Was [Partially] Funded

Perhaps the most surprising role of the Enlightened Retreat was the role the philanthropic community played in it. Throughout most of its history previously, philanthropic organization were heavily tied to interests of the ruling elite. Their role had traditionally been to stop capitalism from being too brutal by providing for some basic human services the state would not and channeling righteous anger of oppressed people to movements of reform from within current political and economic frameworks so that all social change rarely threatened the status quo of the ruling class.

Not surprisingly, the rise of “progressive” billionaire philanthropist like Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates who criticized government austerity programs and inequality actually fueled conservatives in government dismantling the welfare state by showing that they would donate in proportion to the increased need created by cuts in government spending. Their charity actually played well into the argument that it is “civil society’s” responsibility to care for the poor and not the government. Thus, when the housing bubble burst in 2018 and the Trump administration responded with tax cuts and corporate buy-outs, the top 20% of the wealthiest Americans saw an increase in wealth while the bottom 80% saw a substantial decrease. Therefore, the amount of money in Philanthropic communities increased dramatically while the class of middle class white people who managed the social service organizations that received most of that money now saw themselves eligible for the services they delivered.

While the privatizations of social services had tremendously devastating effects on services as workers lost wages and protections, it also significantly decentralized the how social services were provided. In perhaps one of the era’s deepest ironies, the privatization did in fact allow for more innovation but not more neo-liberal individualization.

The shrinking of the middle class ironically transformed social service delivery because they people who needed services were now mainstream and no longer just marginalized communities. This precipitated the rise of the community directed service model designed to empower formerly middle class white communities that quickly made its way into urban cores around the country. Like the embattled communist who entered unions in the 40’s and 50’s, the anti-racist, anti-authoritarians of the enlightened retreat who managed to avoid jail time entered direct service organizations in droves. These influx in former political activist radicalized the industry in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most profound change was the shift from top down, massively hierarchical organized to more self-managed teams doing hyper local service provision.

These hyper local teams of food trucks, health workers and small mental health clinics developed actual relationships with the community. While the overall racial, gender and class hierarchies and pay disparities remained [frontline staff being mostly underpaid women of color] the staff in the communities had much more autonomy than they had as government workers. Many of these front-line staffers were friends and relatives to members of the more overtly political and thus clandestine speakeasies of the era. They would end up playing a critical role in distributing the political pamphlets and often became block captains for the PRE during elections.

The Black communities who were the most devastated by social service cuts became the most invested in mutual aid programs. Due to America’s historic segregation, the Black middle class saw itself once again surrounded by poverty. However, due to the lack of overt discrimination in many industries, the Black upper class retained much of income despite losing much of its wealth in the housing bubble. This ironically put the Black middle class in position of having the income to donate to social improvement, while redlining and discrimination in housing loans meant that they were unable to leave and needed to find alternative ways to have economic security outside building family wealth.

These conditions, combined with the decentralization of social services meant that Black people’s economic situation and political cohesion started to look nearly identical to how it looked at the beginning of the civil right movement. However, six years of solid M4BL organizing and increase of overt anti-Black racism meant that institutions like the NAACP and the Urban League were open to a Black politics that centered cross class solidarity rather than respectability politics. Once again, the line between the elite assimilationist Black politics and more radical, often nationalist Black politics, was blurred as it had been 50 years before. So while philanthropic communities still gave little to overtly political social groups [some of which had also become illegal with the re-authorization of the patriot act] the established Black groups they gave the majority of their money to were much more willing able to pass some of that money onto clandestine activities. With the elimination of the IRS and increase of allowances of political activity by religious groups passed through the Tax Revision Act of 2020, this funnel from rich philanthropist to clandestine organizing groups became even more prosperous.

Prominent contemporary scholar Jasmine Banks noted that “we often forget how absurd the old political and economic order was. It would be inaccurate to say that the progressive wealthy class acted against their monetary interests because of the moral evil of inequality. Rather, they worked towards their material interests by supporting an expanded safety net versus risking the inevitable attempts to address inequality through violence that had been the strategy of the disposed for centuries. The fact that the safety net led to the co-operative economy that would replace capitalism was not something they would have foreseen and, honestly, happened on a timeline that the crisis of liberal society did not allow them to think on.”

The Rise of the Political Speakeasies

Just as prohibition had given rise to organized crime so did the combination of laws prohibiting anti-government protesting but expanding the ability of religious institutions to do political work give rise to an underground political resistance movement. These speakeasies evolved from informal gatherings were people met in national parks, community swimming pools, YMCA’s or other places where people with little disposable income could gather and be social together. It just so happened that many of these gathering spaces were places where you could be relatively sure of little government surveillance to vent and complain about the government. As the economic crisis worsened low cost activities like reading groups, potlucks, and rent parties that Black and Latinx people would throw to raise money for their rent, became more and more common.

Organizers who managed to escape the purges would often find each other at these gatherings and form small little pods or affinity groups of closeted dissidents. Overtime, they began to have their own gatherings that were spread through word of mouth or embedded in geo-cashes by hackers. Participants would show up, dump their phones in cooper and lead lined box and hang out together. The vast majority of speakeasies were barely even politically but allowed for people to “thumb their noses” at the repressive government. In places like Miami, Houston and L.A. these speakeasies give rise to the Cabal movement of small dance clubs where people escaped the Puritanatical politics of the Ryan Regime through juking, grinding and twerking.

Most cities however, had two or three regular speakeasies, often differented by racial, class, and sexual expression of the participants, that were overtly political. While these identity differences often times caused conflicts, there was generally enough of a sense of a common enemy and pre-existing relationships across groups that they could work together. In larger urban cores like NYC, D.C, and Oakland, there were often dozens of such groups that were often coordinated through spokescouncils or steering committees. Out of fear of repression, these groups generally worked to find and support comrades who had been imprisoned or deported.

Inspired by political activity in Palestine during the first Intifada however, they began to use the emerging network of direct service provides, CSA’s and block parties to launch their “rolling black outs” and other demonstrations of civil disobedience. The clandestine nature of their work and their prefigurative, anarchist influenced politics, meant that they had to developed new ways of self-governance across racial, gender and class differences that didn’t require 6 hour meetings which would have been suspicious.

Perhaps one of their most enduring developments was political hand dancing. Inspired by Black culture in D.C., Maryland and Virginia as well as the slaves who developed Capoeira in Brazil, political hand dancing allowed for communication of complex group decision to debated and accepted in real time without speaking. Originally developed as a warning system for police raids and as way to coordinate evacuating hideouts and delegating the destruction of materials on the fly, political hand dancing or the clapping game become a crucial tool for coordinating the silent Afrikan blocs during the general strikes.

By utilizing complexity theory, hip hop culture and musical theory the clapping game was used much like war drums of earlier eras yet the call and response, “remix” and beat dropping allowed for the “orders” to be decided by swarm intelligence. Affinity groups self-organized themselves into sensors, responders and facilitators. Each role has its sound: sensors clapped, responders drummed on whatever was available while facilitators hummed or sang well known songs to different rhythms. Sensors role were to sense police presence and warn others of raids, kettling practices or general police movement. Responders developed responses to the sensors, often directing people to go to specific hideouts [each with their own beat] or to scatter. Facilitators had two roles one was to create noises that made it hard for the police to follow what was going one and two was communicate the meanings of the different codes that the responders were using.

The codes used were often determined by whatever songs were being played by speakeasy DJays or with new lyrics that often used inside jokes, movement slang and elaborate metaphors to refer to places that speakeasies met. The complex system allowed for groups to utilize swarm intelligence to evade the police even when leaders were arrested or not decided before had. Due to its relatively simple rules and communal nature, versions of the clap game become wide spread. The rules of the clap game were innovated on time and time again to be more effective. The decentralized network and self-referential nature of the code also made it secure as the police would have be incredible skilled at the game in addition to understanding the codes to counteract in real time.

While the clap game was the most famous innovation of self-governance it was hardly the only one. In many areas, CSA were coordinated into regional council for food distribution, women’s councils were created above ground to deal with street harassment and underground to provide clandestine reproductive health after the family values act was passed in 2020 severely limited reproductive choice. As the police force become more and more overtly political, the justice system lost more and more legitimacy. Eventually, speakeasies were created to do restorative circles for community violence ranging from theft, to domestic partner violence to arson.

In Detroit, the speakeasies spokes council partnered with the Malcolm X grassroots movement to create the Party of Revolution and Evolution [PRE] in 2021. In just three years, the PRE utilized a decentralized “movement DNA” system to create chapters around the country that began building larger networks of mutual aid and eventually taking over local governments across the country.

Aftermath

The beginning of the end of the Enlightened Retreat was the general strike of the defense industry in 2021. The strike was organized by collaboration between the East Coast chapters of the Black Lives Matter [BLM] Network who partnered with International Workers of the World [IWW] across the country. While most historians agree that the general strike only effected a handful of factories and did not significantly threaten the war it was a major symbolic victory. It showed the maturation of the fight for racial justice with one the first major multi-racial attacks against racialized capitalism and imperialism. It also gave an example of effective organizing to all the networks of mutual aid that had been building over the last 3 years.

The subsequent trial of the BLM leaders was meant to instill fear in any other dissidents. The leaders of the campaign were pulled from their houses at night and brutally detained. The police feared brutality against young white people would back fire against the state, especially considering that the IWW had their largest presence on elite college campuses that were doing Department of Defense research. Thus they rounded up the white IWW organizers gently and in secret. This tactic actually backfired as it showed blatant racism and racial disparities of policing as well as deep class differences.

The attorney general Rudolf Giuliani charged the organizers with treason, a tactic that was meant to scare off further organizing but seemed more like government overreach as the penalty for treason was death. The trial was the much watched television event of the century and rather than discouraged protests it inspired protest across the country.

*this is a piece of speculation political fiction with just a hint of satire written in the form of a Wikipedia article form the future. The purpose is imagine what all this craziness from the white house might be building to while envision how peace might come out of chaos and tragedy. We should not take Trump’s idiocy or bluster lightly. When the autocrat says he is coming for you believe him! I believe we can prevent violence in the long run if we build for transformation and autonomy now*

Overview:

The Unending March.

The Unending March, also called the Bloody March or the March of Blood, is a series of mass arrests and political purges carried out by the Federal Order of Police and the Proud Boy Brigades in January of 2019. It was part of Donald Trump’s attempt to consolidate power ahead of the Calexit, as the California Succession movement was then known. Despite its legacy as the beginning of political purge of the American left, most of the causalities were actually political moderates and rival members of the Republican Party and the armed forces. The most famous killing was the public execution of the 26th Secretary of the Department of Defense James Norman “Jim” Mattis by John Carver Johnson on January 30th during a press conference.

The Term “Unending March” comes from a speech by then Vice President Mike Pence who, at the March for American Patriots on January 20, 2019 said that “believers in America liberty most [sic] not allow social degenerates to rule our streets. In response to marches of feminist and queers we need an unending march of American patriots in every city of this great country.” After the bombings of the New York and Chicago subway systems later that afternoon were blamed on queer anarchist supposedly funded by ISIS, the coalition of white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups called the American People’s Army began making internet memes calling for mass violence against LGBTQ people, Arabs, Muslims and Black Lives Matter activists using the phrase “Unending March.”

The morning after the bombings President Donald Trump attempted to institute a nationwide martial law despite there being fewer than 10 casualties and the suspects being quickly identified and apprehended by local police departments. On January 22nd, Secretary Mattis said that he felt a nationwide martial law was completely uncalled for given the circumstances and recommended that the America people try to heal the divides that had been growing under the Trump administration through “understanding and respectful dialogue.” This in turn caused Donald Trump to publically call for Mattis’ resignation, though he later backtracked on that call after the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a statement against marshal law.

The newly appointed head of the Federal Order of Police, Edwardo Pena, was tasked by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “root out the enemy where ever he may be.” Edwardo Pena began working through his newly created office to coordinate the national police response through the Fraternal Orders of Police. Though this coordination would be later ruled unconstitutional, Edwardo was able to coordinate the arrest and detention of over 10,200 activist, organizers and journalist who had been flagged under the now infamous “Law and Order” program which monitored protestors. These mass arrests triggered wide spread protests which eventually became uprisings in 13 cities.

Memo’s leaked by Wiki Leaks in 2020 later revealed that the Uprisings had been planned by the Trump Administration who increased militarized policing through the so called “War on Drugs” while eliminating human services spending hoping that the increase in crime would justify even more authoritarian actions by the administration. Despite the chaos, many Democratic and moderate republican governors and mayors refused to call in the National Guard to stop the uprisings. This led to the American People’s Army to call for a mass mobilization across the country which eventually led to the paramilitary group attacking politicians and military leaders who were openly critical of the Trump regime.

Over 300 hundred movement leaders, politicians and military leader were killed in the ensuing chaos. Though it has never be substantiated, it is widely believed that members of Donald Trump’s administration provided the paramilitary forces with names and locations of individuals to target. A series of memos leaked to the British magazine The Guardian, later known as the Trump papers or red papers, did confirm that Donald Trump personally ordered Edwardo Pena to target activists with whom he had personal enmity towards including members of the group Black Lives Matter. These memos would later led to Donald Trump’s impeachment, the resignation of Mike Pence and the criminal trials of Jeff Sessions and Edwardo Pena.

Many scholars believe that the Unending March would have sparked a Second American Civil War had the World War 3 not started with the Invasion of Qatar 6 months later and following UN Syrian Resolution Crisis in the winter. The uprisings in American cities continued for many months including the D.C uprising in May of 2019 which forced the inauguration of President Paul Ryan to retreat to Camp David and resulted in the burning of the capital building by the newly established Maroon Society.

Calexit and Anti-Trumpism

Donald Trump was elected in the “Stolen Election of 2016” in which a confluence of the archaic Electoral College system, massive voter repression by the Republican Party, Russian political influence, an apathetic electorate and the first use of psychometrics in an American election. He lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and was inaugurated under mass protests as the least popular America president in history. Though modern scholars generally classify the Donald Trump administration as a plutocratic kleptocracy it was widely seen as proto-fascist by its contemporaries. The rise of “Trumpism” as it was called, coincided with a rise in the American left, particularly in the anti-authoritarian and anti-racist tendencies as many Americans began to view liberalism and conservatism as two parts of the same problem that caused the years of political dysfunction that had preceded Trump.

The left leaning and most populous American state of California, now part of the Western American Maroon Society, voted in 2018 to have a special election on California succession. This vote came after a heated legal battle over California’s right to stop payments to the federal government which had threatened to bankrupt the country just a few months before. In addition, the two years of Trump’s administration saw months of mass mobilizations against his agenda. This period of America history would later be dubbed the “Era of Marches”, due to the 26 marches on Washington with over 6,000,000 people that the period saw.

Trump’s attacks on women, people of color, LGBTQ communities and immigrants also lead to an historical level of cross community political activity that was rare for America at the time. After the federal government shut down of 2018 over the debt ceiling and subsequent human service crisis, this period also saw the beginning of the autonomous community organizing that would later form the basis of the War World III era Maroon Societies. The growing strength of all of these movements had led to growing bi-partisan establishment call for Trump’s impeachment.

Military Opposition to Trumpism

Despite his nationalist rhetoric, Trump was unable to coalesce military support around his presidency. While sentient beings today can’t imagine a “just military,” at the time, the U.S. military had seen itself a force for peace and stability in the world in which America led alliance kept threats at bay. Therefore Donald Trump’s short-sighted isolationism and chaotic behavior did not endear him to the military. In addition, Trump was loathe to actually listen to current military leadership and tended to rely on retired and often disgraced military leaders for consul. Therefore, those in the military who might have otherwise been emendable to his “America first” isolationism were often at odds with him for more personal reasons. Even Marine Corps, which had supported Trump’s ill planned invasion of the Philippines in March of 2018 had lost faith in him by the beginning of his third year in office.

Rank and file soldiers however were consistently opposed to the Trump administration. Even before the heavily causalities of the invasion of Manila, the rank a file U.S military had protested the White House’s defunding of veteran services. With much of the logistical support roles in the military being privatized and the controversial and short lived 12-20 program that allowed mercenary soldiers to command U.S. troops, the rank and file soldier was often of low rank and lower pay. Without the typical veteran and active duty support programs and the skyrocketing price of food do the trade wars with Mexico and China, many scholars believe that the U.S. military was nearly mutinous by the end of his term. Fragging of mercenary officers’ quarters was wide spread during Operation Island Thunder and only increased after the Bay of Manila disaster.

Aftermath

The majority of Americans were unsure of which news sources and leaders to trust after the initial terrorist attacks in New York and Chicago. As the crisis deepened, most Americans lost trust in mainstream media completely and started to see the dangers of the continual war on terror. However, rather than spurring a movement against the surveillance state, the lack of trust actually allowed the Ryan administration to launch an attack against progressives and radicals that far eclipsed the McCarthy years. When the rumors of night raids and detention centers were first confirmed by the NYT and even fox news, most Americans were no longer heeding news organizations.

It wasn’t until the Teen Vogue’s coverage of the treason trials of the leadership of Black Lives Matter after they organized a symbolically successful strike of the defense industry in May of 2021 that most Americans began tuning back into national media sources. Before the Trump administration, Teen Vogue was not seen as a news agency but by the end of WW3 it was the most respected source of investigative journalism in the world.

Overall, shock of the unending march and resulting political turmoil was devastating to the American psyche. Many leftist organizers went underground and began organizing small affinity groups of mutual aid. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in her 2025 book “The time of great unlearning” called this period the “enlightened retreat” after an anonymous memo written at the time called “the way out is in, together.” The shift from disruptive politics to mutual aid politics ended in the general strikes of 2022 and 2023 with the rise of Differential Autonomous Transformative [DAT] ecosystem organizing. By the time of the 2024 general strike, the American left [through decentralized and relatively young] was the largest political block in America. They successful ended WW3 with a general strike reminiscent of the communist in WW1.

Despite the shock and trauma of the nearly 10 year period, DAT ecosystems focus of healing and transformation lead to a marked increase in international cooperation and what would later be called “progressive globalization.” The Party of Revolution and Evolution [the PRE] would come to power in the U.S. in 2024 and stay in power until the dissolution of the United States, and all other nation-states, through “World without Border” U.R. resolution in 2044.

The World Without Border’s [WWB] resolution is considered by most to be the greatest achievement of the leaders of the enlightened retreat as it effectively ended wars between humans and ushered in the greatest era of peace time prosperity and cooperative and ecologically conscious economic development between the last war [the battle of Jerusalem] and Alpha Centari Liberation War.

In popular culture

The WWB was a result of decades of global activism lead by members of the North American resistance movement founded just after the Unending March. A monument to these heroes was constructed in 2050 in Maroon Society of Anacostia [formerly Washington D.C.].

The human species folk anthem, “Below and to the Left” is based on this period of Earth human history.

The 2100 Kwame Jones historical drama “Unapologetically Black,” chronicles the leaders of M4BL who were instrumental who came to leadership in response to the devastation of the Unending March.

The short lived T.V series “Queer as Fuck” follows several U.S, Mexican and Canadian teens throughout these tumultuous years.

In his trilogy “Race Traitors: The Death of Whiteness,” Mark Peace argues that the virulent racism of the Unending March was the catalyst for the “Race Traitor” movement of European ethnic groups re-creating their identities through the lens of progressive globalism.

Last weekend I got the distinct privilege to go on a leadership retreat in the Bay Area put on by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship which focused, in part, of their Build/Block/Be framework for spiritually in-tune social justice work. Below is a brief overview [at least of my understating] of that frame work and poetic reflection of my amazing time at the retreat!

Build: An analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives

Be: Shifts in consciousness and new paradigms that are embodied individually and collectively before, after and during blocking and building actions in order to increase sustainability, effectiveness and trans-formative pre-figurative capabilities. The underlying view point that encompasses why want to Block something and how you go about building.

Blocking-Building-Being

Sometimes the brown eyes, and smiles, and revolutionary acts of kindness makes me undone.Sometimes the shutdown/stand up/fight back/ March on/make breakfast/still love is too much to bare.Sometimes your ability to hold the world & the legions inside of you in balance is kinesthetic poetrySometimes revolutionary/transformative power flows through the me/us/Inseparable/Ubuntu

Sometimes I can see/feel the line between where I am and where I want to goA long golden arch of faithTwisting-Turning-Flowing freely like these words through our lipsBeing bent towards justiceI can feel/sense this pull of energyAnd ride it through timeNavigating through and around bodies in motionGathering power as I/we slide

Sometimes this command whispers to meStroking my hive mind gentlyLifting us upCoaxing me to break the world

Sometimes I/We listen.Sometimes I break all the rules:Building, blocking, being,Transforming,Growing,Nurturing,Weeding,Feeding,Watering,Letting the runoff drown the invasive speciesAs I slide towards liberation.

In these moments I/We Am/Are Whole-But still hungry-Never alone.

We stand with allTime travelers, sliders, growers of power, warriors for peace

Building, Blocking, Being:The deconstructors of worlds.Called forth to be the healers of our ancestorsAnd spirt guides to our descendants.

We are more beautiful than they ever imaginedWe are more powerful than even we can seeWe are more capable than they could have hoped forWe are everything they’d hope we’d be.

Headed Towards the Light: An Itinerant Cartographers Unfinished Guide to the Poetics of the Movement for Black Lives.

My thoughts coalesce in long walks.

I take long, slow and steady strolls throughout the city examining the network of disparate thoughts that float through my mind. Each step makes a critical connection. Each street corner reminds me of another data point. My mind elongates in tandem with my strides, expanding to compute a thousand daily concerns and musing.

Over the past month I have walked through several valleys of understanding. I’ve taken a really long and hard look at how I’ve been operating over the past year. At first, it was difficult even to focus on it all. Every action, speech, rally and interaction with police was blurred together in one side splitting mental imprint of stress, anxiety, hope, rage and fear.

As I strolled through city blocks in DC and Brooklyn, I unpacked these dense imprints to examine the impact this year had on me. As I unpacked them, I could feel myself decompress and a weight slowly begin to lift off my shoulders. Unencumbered by these chains of constant anxiety I saw a bit of my former self start to return.

I began to remember how much I enjoy playing the dozens with friends and family. I remembered how calm I used to feel before the hurricane of constant organizing. I began to be able to appreciate, for the first time in a long time, how truly wonderful, amazing and beyond my wildest dreams this past year had been.

Despite the pain and agony of constantly reacting to another death, another sign that we are not meant to survive this system, I realized that I have been blessed with a wonderful, radical and radically supportive community. I have been blessed with an increased faith in my abilities and decreased need to prove my worth. I have been blessed with a spiritual awareness of the world and my place in it. I have become more acquainted with my internal power and more comfortable standing in it.

With each step, I was able to gain more and more of this perspective and more and more weight fell off my shoulders. Yet something has been missing. There has been an almost indiscernible feeling of internal lacking, of waiting from something to enter my life and complete my sabbatical.

I realize that I’ve been waiting, somewhat foolishly, for my old self to return. Yet the more I reflect, the more I realize that he no longer exists. Part of him grew up over the past two years and part of him was buried in Baltimore. In his place is n older, more patient, more jaded and more self-aware blend of echoes of my father and the person I was as a kid.

______________________________________________________

Walking is one of the few things that can slow the torrent of coupled thoughts that often race through my mind. It is one of the few forms of meditation that brings me to the particular sort of calm in which I feel the most myself. It is a reflective, active calm like the mind of an athlete ready to jump. Even though the blood begins to rush into my hands in anticipation, unlike an athlete, my movements are entirely metaphoric.

It is perhaps ironic then that after my walks I could not describe to you much of what I saw nor could I give you directions to where I went. I have no mind for mundane details. I remember only the slight details a painter might use to accent a work or the descending notes a composer uses to let you know the piece was ending. I tend to only remember the details useful for storytelling.

It might then be even more ironic that I have come to think of myself as a verbal cartographer. I cannot, for the life of me, tell you how to get from point A to B but I could describe, illustratively and in exquisite detail what the journey will feel like. I could point out to you, if you were interested, the history of significant ruins you might encounter along the way. I would end each map with a key explaining why the journey is so viscerally important. Yet I’m very bad at directing folks to where I feel they should go because it assumes a specific singular destination.

I think this is why I prefer poetry to prose.
It’s easier.
A rarity of words,
Increases impact.

Like a lover,
leaving the ring on the counter,
in lieu papers;
communicating more in questions begged,
than answers given.

But I digress.

I have, over the past year, developed more interest in complicating journeys than prescribing destinations. Perhaps it’s fatigue. Perhaps it’s uncertainty. Perhaps it’s a begrudging humility. Likely it’s all three. Either way, I’m more interested in poetry than prose.

“I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean–in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.

In another life I would have been a cartographer.

I can see myself devouring the latest missives from the “new world.” Immediately incorporating them in my maps. The outlines of coasts getting more and more accurate as times goes on. The descriptions of the people and culture getting more vivid and useful.

But the edges of the map, of the known world, would always be illustrated with the myths I felt to be true. The gryphons of the cold wintery north, dragons of the distance east, the giants that laid waste to the northern desserts. Over time we will discover the eagles, the alligators, the massive blue whales and giant squids that looked like krakens and myth will turn into science and we will pretend that we understand the world.

These are the many tensions in my soul. The observed and the felt. The diagram and the dreamscape. Different understandings fueled by a desire to know and explore, driven by the most ardent curiosity. A deep sense of the world in its totality but lack of understanding.
Of it’s beauty.
Its wonder.
It’s terror.
It’s Poetics.
Dialectical, symmetrically assembled choreography of masses, forces and networks of consciousness that I feel a deep, ethereal connection to.

I will forever be in debt to writers like Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler and Adrienne Maree Brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs for giving me language to explore and illustrate the edges of the map. I will be in debt to thinkers and spiritualists like Erika Totten and Omolara Williams McCallister for reminding me that there are many levels and kinds of understanding and multiple dimensions on which to know a thing. It is debt shared by all the Black Queer Feminist in my life whose power and energy inspire me, especially my sisters who taught me how to dream.

This is all to say, after a month long spiritual sabbatical, I wish to share with you a map of the edge of my understanding. I wish to illustrate, in the best medium I have available to me [poetics], the uncharted territory that my movement family and I have been exploring in the past year in the Movement for Black Lives.

A Unfinished Map Towards Liberation:

The topography is vigorous,
A land of dynamic forces.
Energies that are both waves and particles:
ideas,
impulses,
neurons firing in our brains
and chemical reactions to historical, economic, existential and social stimulants.
There are forces of beauty and wonder,
forces of oppression and human limitation.
There is bondage and emancipation.
Growth and decay.
Blossoming and withering.

These forces etch themselves unto the landscape of human experience, craving systems of opposition, obstacles to forward paths and valleys of understanding.

The west side of the map is our past: clouded in the fog of war, myth and dogma.

In the middle lies our present: dense, humid and warming.

Towards the east is our unknowable future: shrouded in mystery and wrapped in anticipation.

To the north is the observable world of facts and figures and

in the south lies the equally true world of dreams, feelings, imaginations, the science of living and other knowings.

Liberation lies to the SE of our present location.

“The man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all.” Erykah Badu – On and On

As we travel towards liberation, we must ensure we are equipped for the journey. It is a rough road for the ill-prepared. We could not climb the mountains of true understanding without collecting the theory and analysis of the north and weaving them into the dreams and internal knowings of the south. Unfortunately, our species is not yet equipped to walk a straight path towards liberation. It will be meandering journey of starts and stutters.

On the frayed edges of the map are the metaphysical oceans where the forces of the land coalesce and pool. The rocky bays that connect these rivers of forces to the oceans of power filter out the impurities of domination, hierarchy, and inequity. Still, the depths of these oceans are dangerous to the unpracticed swimmer. The call of God is a siren to the unlearned ear, pulling you into these jagged rocks and in these oceans lay a terrifyingly transformative power.

Notes on the oceans of power:

From my travels in the south, I learned to bottle my dreams so that I can access this power. I see my sisters access it at protests. I drink from it nightly and feel it overwhelm me when I speak truth to the world. I sense is flow through me as my mind flows unto the page.
I intuit that this emotional energy, this transformative power, has the capacity to shatter this land.

I can access it at any time.

Sometimes, when I allow myself to access this power, shutting down highways, testifying in the Wilson building as knowledge coalesces effortlessly in my mind and flows freely from my lips; I think that the power is right when it suggests that I should break the world.

I am terrified, infatuated and addicted to this embodied power.

My movement family and I access this power together.

Collectively we both heighten it and hold it accountable.

I believe that this power is our salvation.

I have recognized this power as my birthright.

I have invited you, before I was even aware of what it was, to drink from my dreams and stand in this power with me.

“I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, “Why don’t they?” And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change.

So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

The Movement for Black Lives is not asking for special treatment for Black people. Nor are we only asking for our needs to finally be meet after centuries of erasure or myths of pathology.

Rather, activists are returning from the edges of the known world, pointing out the holes in the dominate logics and inviting the world to stand with us in the light that shines through. We are shouting to you that this light is proof that this world is under ground, buried beneath a capitalist system of dominance maintained by patriarchy and white supremacy.

The movement for Black Lives is reminding all of us that we need to head SE towards liberation.

Years of being underground, submerged in this system, has dimmed many of our faculties while studying our surroundings [even in dimness] has brightened others. Yet all told, we have lived only in the north for far too long. We have become stagnant in our civilizations, forgotten our migratory nature and carved out pieces of the earth.

As if we could own it.

As if it didn’t own us.

We have lost much of the accumulated wisdom of the south. We have forgotten about how to be, to live in harmony with our selves, to seek to learn from the world without destroying it.

The M4BL is asserting that the particular position of Black people [especially Working Class Black Queer Women] in the system and the history invasions that forced us to flee periodically to the south gives us the second sight to help guide humanity out of the darkness and into the light.

We are giving you fair warning before we drag this whole system, amid its suffocating totality, into the above ground world we have been forced out of and almost forgotten.

We do not believe that when we return to the light we will return to a previous way of life. We are futurist not primitivists. We have chosen to be Diasporic Cosmonauts not earthly refugees. What is past is prologue, it needn’t be destiny nor our chosen destination. We believe that once in the light we must still journey east towards liberation, onwards to a new world that is better than we have ever experienced or can currently imagine.

The Movement for Black Lives believes in the fundamental ability of our imaginations and dreams to store and share transformative power. The power that we need to overcome the totality of capitalism and logics of dominance. The same power we will need to climb the mountains of true understanding.

We, beautifully flawed humans that can neither tolerate a world order that, in thinking we are worthy of its oppression, is beneath us nor wait idly by as it consumes itself, are headed towards the lands filled with the glorious black light of the power contained in the ocean of human imagination. We will not merely content ourselves to observe the effects of its absence.

Ours is a long march of trials, falters, tribulations, celebrations and lessons.

We are unlearning that all struggle must be painful and that all pain is wasteful. We are relearning the elation of change, the euphoria of spiritual endorphins that comes from exercising new muscles of self-determination.

Our wanderings in the south have taught us to embody old stories in new ways. We have become updaters and remixers not needless iconoclasts. We are Christ like in our imperfect divinity and utilizing of love, Mohammedan in our submission to the divine and commitment to study and like Moses we lead the captive, sometimes too content to settle near the lands of the pharaoh, on the long march to emancipation.

We are workers building class consciousness and harnessing the science of revolution in a new economy. Mothers who are also teachers and nurses smashing the patriarchy and midwives birthing a gender fluid world. We are the Ebony skinned neo-abolitionists delivering the supersedants to zion. We are anarchist fighting against the alienation of our transformative power. All while being queer as fuck and refusing to let these histories, texts or identities define us.

If this way of being destroys your idols it is collateral damages of a fluid world in motion.

Notes on the Underground Landscape:

“Alienation is the gap between desire and what is socially valued, between our potential to transform the world and the theft and parasitic use of that power by capital and the state.” Anonymous

Capitalism became total, and blotted out the sun, when it began selling us deficits instead of just commodities. We now have a culture of deficits and inflated spiritual debts. We are too ugly. Too Black. Too poor. Too femme. Too foreign. Or too queer to fit in. We must work, buy, sell and scrape to get closer to an unattainable able-bodied, symmetric, fit, white, wealthy, male ideal citizen.

What we have is a global system of perverted forces that create false scarcities and deficits before providing draining resources we are told will solve them. It is as if we are desert people living in a glorious oasis but being sold salt water and taught that to live is to hydrate.

The long buried truth is that the vocation of all humans is to live fully and in communion with their needs and shared desires. We are the intellectually nomadic bards of our own histories and songs, living well in order to share our stories with each other. The fullness to which we aspire is a facet of our species’ current and progressing social and economic development which in turn shapes our desires.

Yet we are told that in order to live we must work and observe and buy.

We are told what we must do in order to be.

The options given to us in the cold calculating north, these shadow life vocations, constantly place us under the control of others but out of relationship with ourselves and each other. Most revolutionary ethos in the west merely seek to change the ruling class without changeling the idea of ruling. Others merely put forth hollow and solitary images of individual self-determination.

Our journeys southland, to our dreams, have taught us that instead we must reframe our whole realm of living. We must stop wasting our spiritual energy tweaking the details of our alienation from our true vocation–cultivating a land we were never meant to settle in–so that we no longer have any opinions on its totality.

“In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges everyone to be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroën, spaghetti, mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nationalization, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. Everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent them from having one about the totality.”Basic Banalities — Raoul Vaneigem

Yet our goal cannot be as narrow as ending capitalism. This map leads to liberation, not merely away from our past. While this global society serves our bosses more than us and they exhibit more control over it, the system does not really serve them either. The same way that proximity to power is not power, having the system geared towards you does not mean it fulfills you. It does not allow the wealthy to fulfill their full vocation. Their true vocation is not power. Yet their options are limited by their determined gaze at their feet on our backs.

They are merely favored captives chained by their fathers and forced to stare at shadows of the forms on the walls of the cave; convinced that it’s not prison because they have box seats. The same gaslights they use to tell us that America is not a prison because we have cable in here.

The same can be said of emotionally stunted men and emotionally fragile whites too chained to their positions above those they oppress to run freely and gaily southeasterly towards their true vocations.

This does not absolve them [or us] of their [or our] complicity, it merely goes to show us that switching positions with them or raising everyone to their standard [as if this would even be possible without destroying the very system that enshrines and maintains that standard] is not a solution.

Reform is not revolution.

Equity is not liberation.

Notes on the Roads to Liberation[s]:

There is no one path to Liberation. The straight course from our current position to liberation is perilous and we are not equipped to take it.

We must use the analysis of the north to identify the systems of oppression that alienate us from our true vocation. We must use the dream materials of the south to dismantle them and create space for our evolving work that approaches authentic fulfilling human vocation. We must synthesis the techniques of the north and south to heal ourselves and our communities in order to clear our collective imaginations of the miasma of oppression and fog of trauma that clouds our vision. We must work together to build a new world aligned with our new vision in the shell of the old world we are dismantling. All of this must happen at once.

Yet this work does not happen in a vacuum. In order to work collectively we must address the systems of oppression; white supremacy, patriarchy and xenophobia, which has thwarted journeys in the past. This path is hard and healing will consistently be needed. The way forward is dark and we will need our theory to guide the way, our historical experience and the wisdom of our ancestries will guide us through forks in the road. We must develop spiritual practices and spiritual farms [beloved communities] that will feed us as we crawl through the darkness headed towards the light.

This is the unfinished map of the Movement for Black Lives. It is for this vision we are dragging our society kicking and screaming through the darkness and into the light. We may stumble, we may falter, we may get lost but we are committed to our task.

We fight even for those you would not fight for us. We fight even for those who would stand against us. While powerful, we are not large enough to hold this society on our backs without dropping or fragmenting parts. We cannot hold enough of it in our consciousness to ensure that precious parts of it are not forgotten. So those of you who share these visions, dreams and analyses must carry your load of the world with us.

Only collective liberation is strong enough to carry all of society into the light without tearing it asunder.

Only collective liberation can provide enough guidance to show us the way to the light, without it we can only fight against the darkness unsure if we are headed up or down.

Only collective liberation can plant the spiritual fruits complex enough to feed the army of sojourners needed to bring this society into the light. And only in the light and we build the true world.

Only in the light can we see and be our true selves.

So I invite you to drink from this cup of dreams, to stand in this power with me.

Together we shall create a revolutionary communal praxis able to wield our new analytical dreamscapes through story and song, organizing and building, through destruction and creation and ultimately: rebirth.

Now in the second week of my spiritual sabbatical I am doing a lot of work to think about who I am, who I’ve been and who I am trying to be. Specifically, re-thinking this notion that I have internalized that I am what I do and accomplish. As I take steps back from organizing and trying to publish my art and writings, two things that I [used to] use to measure my self worth, am starting to re-think how I should conceive of my self and my contributions to the world.
I want[ed?] to be published in a journal or magazine so that I can be validated as a writer by a system that I do not respect and do not esteem enough to trust its judgement but have internalized its authority over my work. I have internalized a dual desire to own my work and be validated as an individual of great worth and genius. That is at odds with a deeply embedded, powerful subconscious desire to share and remix and collaborate with a community of artist, loved ones, lovers and friends.

I know that worship of the written word is a part of white middle class dominate culture and as a written artist [separate but related to being a writer] of color I struggle with this. Thanks to my dear friend and comrade and spiritual teacher Erika Totten I came across this talk by an amazing artist, dreamer, feminist freedom fighter and academic Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She ties together so many things that I have been thinking about. Teasing out strains of thoughts that have been unraveling in my mind and connecting them, beautifully, to deeply held and unprocessed feelings of belief [or things I feel to be true on a subconscious level.]

There is a part of me that hates when people publish things I have been thinking about before I do. It makes me feel less original and less unique. Which it should. Yet, being less unique makes me feel less valuable, which is a capitalist internalization if I’ve ever heard one!

So, I want to thank Alexis Pauline Gumbs for giving me the language to say, I have so many things to unlearn! There is no need to be a snow flake! Think of what we could accomplish as indispensable but interchangeable cogs of a glorious communal machine of change!

I have such powerful dreams and imaginings. I have things that exist in the beautiful intersections of my intellectual genius, my fantastical imaginings of other possible worlds and my deeply held feelings of belief. Over time I have realized how internalized lies of capitalism and cis hetero white supremacist patriarchy have kept me from pulling gems out of those intersections.

The dreams of a Black man are not often worth much on the open market. Men are not supposed to feel as deeply and uncontrollably as I naturally feel. In order for such things to be of any use, they must we fully written out in perfect grammar, vetted by editors and etched in the stone of publication. And above all, the thoughts must be complete. They must be full and brought out to a compelling conclusion.

Yet, my ideas are never complete. My essays and articles and podcasts are not either. I merely force myself to keep them to myself for as long as possible, fixing and writing with fresh eyes until I can no longer contain them and send them out into the universe edited but with grammar mistakes galore.

Instead of feeling bad about this or holding it in longer, I have decided to merely continue to add on, remix, mash together and rewrite my works. I am going to let my works be works in progress. I am going to be more comfortable with myself being a work in progress. If only because it will let me forgive myself more easily and unlearn more of what I need to unlearn.

So, below is a poem that I remixed this morning after hearing Dr. Gubman’s keynote. It reminds me of something a dear friend told me recently: “You are from the future. You are so far ahead of this world.” It is, probably, the best compliment I have ever heard and great testament the internal work I have committed myself to since my last birthday that I was able to [half] belief it.

There is an intellectual story of how we got here, a myth of how we got here and truth of where we are going. This poem is an on going reflection of that, of the three parts of me [intellect, dreams and spiritual feelings] and trips I take, have taken and dream of taking.

The Cyclical Triduum of the Undiscovered Prophetic ArtistsOr If History from the Bottom Had a Greek Chorus

I.

Know thou that God is a Black Woman.

She is a river goddess
Fluid and running and powerful
Old and dark and reflective of your truest beauty
She is terrifying when you are first immersed in her
Unlearned of ways in which our bodies can move in her majesty
We fear her because she wants subsume us
We fear she wants to drown us
To fill our lungs with her essence
We fear her because we cannot process her brilliance
We fear her because we never want to leave her
Yet but cannot breathe her in

We want to own her
We want to incorporate her into us
But have forgotten how to drink

Perennial Last Supper [47th Street,Yonkers]

A photo I took from the hudson line in Yonkers last spring. The trip that inspired most of the following poem.

Street acolytes paint the oxidized steel bridges a bright green,
neon spray painted codex
that guide the observant travelers
down rust gilded train tracks–
a Middle Path along the Hudson—
that ends in art galleries beneath underpasses,
temples to their mantra that another world is possible,
where they sing that art is short
but these tracks,
their canvasses,
stretch for miles.

They jaunt through imaginal spaces
of post-industrial cities,
like 19th century frontiers,
whose souls were marched-
in exodus-
ever westward
pushed by pharonic prospectors
and urban homestead acts.
Economically castrated by redlining
and forcibly sterilized by urban renewal.

Here in this forgotten levant
where Hughes and Ginsberg pondered their mothers’ infinity
on illuminated Black Mecca roof tops
Poets and Vagabond Philosophers
made homeless by forced false choices
feast on visions of a divine counter culture
and discuss the aesthetics of 21 century wanderlust
to the melodic beat of train engines.
A Last Supper set to an industrial rhyme
whose beats and breaks
bring the stockbrokers to work every day.

Tomorrow’s Heroes are marginalized immigrants of the status quowho destroy the logic of hegemony with the visceral illogic of being.They are the dread-locked and conscious prodigal childrencast out of Eden by Adam for refusing to eat the fruitand questioning why g-d placed the tree there in the first place.

We will immortalize them in song only after they are martyred.

Their holy lands are the street corners of yesteryear,Where the burning buses are headphones Emanating the sacred beats of Blackened God.

Later they will lay themselves down on the crossroads
bedding down on iron tracks
for a nightly die-in
and sleep on deferred dreams of resurrection.
Praying, out of habit, to a god they no longer believe in
to be awoken in wake of the next train.

They have no designs of death
but feel that art works in mysterious ways
and are creatures of creative habit.
Like their fathers they’ll ritualize their identity crisis
and pass off their PTSD as sacred tradition.

In the morning,
these listless apostles will follow Her
re-claiming and renaming spaces.
Re-authoring themselves
under the guise of supersession
in order emerge from the Bum Fuck Egypt Upstate
and re-create modernity.

II.
Her Maat is simple:
I am love.
Love and be loved by me.
My love will surround you and hold you.
My love will transform you into who you need to be.

My love is change.
All Wisdom is through me.

Sleep and be transformed.
Be awoken by the eternal truth:
through me you are divine.
Dream yourself fully into this world.

The Art Work On Calgary

Its Easter Sunday and every American’s an artist.
A forsaken poet scribbles Her name
Over large
On every surface
naming and claiming greedily
conquering the urban Oasis
like a barbarian On holiday
in half desperate, fully human creative attempts at agency.

She writes the name Her mother gave Her.

Overgrown Oval letters proclaim Her existence to the world
like birth certificates reissued whenever One doubts their Object permanence.

Doubts that creep into Her mind like the fog that licks the steel of the Hudson line at dawn.

It creeps
gently,
unnoticed,
every morning,
only to dissipate as She reissues Her edicts of existence ever higher and brighter
like the sun.

Brushes become the broken bits
of national ideology weaponized that
underpaid janitors use to pierce her sides,
Her blood-
the paint that bleaches
this metropolitan palimpsest daily,
washes away enough of our sins
to call the gentry in.

Washes away our pasts
leaving just enough history-
like exposed brick-
to make condos out of artist plagued tenements.
Neighborhoods thoroughly white washed in blood,
until all that is left is an after image
burned on the inner eyelids
of the consumer hive-mind.

Every three days She resurrects herself
re-writes Her name on Her city-canvass.
Her revelations are progressive,
Like the art of Her aunts before Her.

Torn between a desire to know and be known
educated between a crack rock
and the Iron Shod Chico’s of a modern Empire
Her followers mistake Her articulations of cognitive dissonance
as the second sight through the veil.

Behold your prophets laid bare!Your Messiah is a creatively maladjustedSteam-Punk who rocked Chucks and Sun-RaAnd cultural anachronisms before their time!

She is no missed place time traveler,Born of a world which knew her power.Her futurisms are lessons you have forgotten!

She leaves Her calling card on old abandoned buildings
deserted shipping containers
and atop water towers
like a young, viral Quixote
schooled in the art of war.
Challenging spring into being
with visual encryption
spray painting Her territory with a vision of a thousand exploding suns.

Her cypher melts away the last bits of snow
washing the feet of the sleeper cars
soothing the anxieties of the unknowing weary and constant travelers.
Her Passion flows like the river
And the devil himself couldn’t tempt Her to stop.

III.
When she spoke she said:
You will know me by my daughters.
You will know my daughters by their magic.
You will know their magic by what it calls you to be.
Your nightmares are merely the dreams you are not ready for yet.
When my daughters break their silence, listen, learn, heal and be transformed.

Aside:

All across the valley, Khaki’ed hipsters and Afro-ed Punks
ride ragged commuter rails
With trolleys labeled working class hero.
As the rolling hills and steep gray cliffs inspire their minds to wander,
She is the canary bird of democracy,
Her prosaic poems draw their psyche back to the moment
And seeing Her name they are reminded of their own needs to be seen
To be acknowledged
To be known
To be loved
To have truly been.

Resurrection Isn’t Always Rebirth

Its Easter Sunday and the dead are rising.
Its Easter Sunday and Lazarus is giving speeches to
workers in the Montana coal mines.
Its Easter Sunday and the Ticonderoga jets from Philipse Manor to Grand Central
as fry cooks fight for 15
and the fog creeps into our minds
forcing us to forget who we once wanted to be
by the time the sun burns away the sins of who we once were.

Its Easter and the creative spirit of every tourist
with a smart phone rises like Lazarus.
We all collectively create.
We all collectively consume.
We all creatively destroy one another
with likes and smiles.
and with the same gloved hands
we shake off the last bits of winter
-memories of a darker, colder time-
like dandruff off our shoulders.

Its Easter and the dead are rising and every American is an artist.
Suburban tourists video The B-Boys
no longer from Brooklyn
pulsating on the ground
like corpses being struck by lightening
gasping quietly as their bodies come alive
and the neighborhood watch grooves to the beat.

Rejoice as your former slaves delight you!Sleep well as the Visigoths learn your languageAnd dance outside your door!Laugh as your daughter falls for the boy you redlined out of your community!

Its Easter Sunday and the dead are rising.
Everything is reborn at its own pace.
The fog returns every morning,
covering our narrative landscape
with the bitter-sweet vapors of yesterday.
Even with this haze obscuring our history
everything is derivative
and every culture is appropriated.

We are the lambs of a deaf god,following ancient blind mysticswho are merely futurist and malcontents,while the philosopher kings spray paint tomorrowon the brownstoned masonry of the cave.

Where is your G-d when the ocean rise?Where is your God when the civilization that created him crumbles?Rome is burning all around usAnd Nero’s bankers plan mansions on the ashen remains of our culture!

Don’t wait for the apostles of a future more livable to be torn apart,limb from limb, in a coliseum market placebefore you let yourself believe.You deserve more than bread and circuses in lieu of democracy.We deserve more than our father’s share croppedcopping mechanism turned institutions.Moments only seem pregnant in hindsightand it doesn’t feel like a revolution until your friends have brought the drums.

It is time to join the egalitarian euphony articulating the future!The era of prophecy has ended.The time for tomorrow is now!

I.
Her daughters are here to teach you what you have forgotten.
Do not fear who they are demanding you to become.
Know that they love you because you deserve to be loved.
Know that because they love you, they make you conscious of what you are not yet aware.
This consciousness is my gift to you.
It will allow you dream even as you walk through the waking world.
It will allow to dream and stay woke.

Do the Laundry
Vacuum my room
Cook Diner
Buy Groceries
Loss Five Pounds
Update Work Plans
Finish Action Planning
Figure Out How To Convince the Workers to Accept the Settlement
Re-write Short Story Ending
Record Poems
Finish Reading the Mayor’s Budget
Finish Reading Sister Outsider
Figure Out How To Say Goodbyes…

So many started things need finishing.
Saul checks the watch his cousin gave him in Chicago two years ago. The one with the chipped glass that he had made plans to fix on Friday after work and before the panel on gentrification he still had to prepare for. It was 9:32. That means it had been almost an exactly 20 minute ride from the restaurant back to his house, assuming that they had only spent 5 minutes in forced pleasantries with his roommates downstairs.

Tomorrow he would have to check in with Karen and ask her about her day. He had been too anxious to ask when he walked in with Angela. He could tell that she wanted to talk with him. He feels bad. He also needs to remember to ask her if they picked a date for the townhall so he could start making turn out calls.

His gluttonous mind was acutely aware of every detail of his room. The union pin reminding him to finish up the grievance form, cross it off his infinite to-do list. The crumpled up draft legislation on the floor reminds him to push out some talking points tonight. He’ll just re-write the ones from last year.

Dirty underwear laying on the floor reminds him he needs to finish the essay he had started on Tuesday instead of doing laundry. He should have cleaned his room before he brought a second date home. She probably doesn’t have enough affinity for him to overlook the filth. Though in fairness, he thought, there is no way he could have predicted this date would end up in his room. Oh, right, he remembers, the date that is happening now.

Saul tries to be present as the remnants from the early spring shower are dripping slowly and soundlessly on the window. The street lamp’s dim light is refracting within the moving droplets. If you are watching closely, you can see a million tiny rainbows on the windowsill. It is what his mother had always called exquisite sacred beauties, the ordinary places where god showed up.

Saul finds himself wondering if other people sees these little things. The play of light on bedroom windows after a storm; the patterns of creases on the bed sheets; the semi irregular assemblage of nobs on the radio that looked like Morse code; the creases on the corners of her lips that came from excessive laughter.

He wonders how she can sit there in front of him like she is not the most beautiful woman in the world. It always amazes him how otherwise observant people could be oblivious to their own beauty. He knows most men would have pointed this out to her by now instead of sitting in silent admiration. Yet Saul feels a deep comfort in the silences, even if they were partly a response to an intimacy that had developed perhaps too quickly in the course of two dates.

Part of him knew that a lot was being assumed about each other in these silences. That their relationship thus far had been laying out their hearts to each other, without discussing all the connective tissues that really made them who they were. With her he experiences silence as an endless series of pregnant pauses giving birth to something magically mundane. He felt an almost meditative calm begin to wash over him. Saul notices that the rhythm of Angela’s breathing was starting to match his own. He was beginning to feel that each deep, almost luxurious breath he took was drawing them closer. It makes the silence seem almost metaphysically productive.

Saul checks his watch, out of habit, but quickly forgets the time. Each moment of silence seems to grow in importance to him. Like sitting here poised precariously between the towering clutter of laundry that still needed to be folded and papers that still needed to be sorted, was the most important thing he could be doing.

Angela communicates volumes in these silences. Straight backed with a naturally proud poise, she exudes a vibrant confidence, even in moments like this. The ease of this moment is part of what Saul likes about her. Her openness always seems so organic, like a warm invitation to an intimate space that she is waiting to walk with him. Her warm solid vulnerability was the first thing he looked for in her eyes but the last thing he wanted her to see in his.

“When I was a kid,” He says stepping into the silence for a moment, “I used to love it when it rained like it was raining earlier. Torrential rain.”

“Me and my siblings used to build a dam around this little…um…little…you know those little tubes that they put under country roads? To make sure they don’t get rained out?”

“Like a drainage pipe?” Angela says quizzically as she unconsciously hooked a stray hair behind her ear. The ardent curiosity in her eyes when she listens to Saul makes him light headed at times. Sometimes Saul wishes he could see himself how she sees him. Interesting, engaging and full of a powerful wonder. He wants so badly to be man she sees when she looks into him.

Maybe that is what attracts me to her he thought. Besides the messy dark hair that always seems to need to be pushed past her ear in a habitual, youthful way. Maybe that is why he had asked her out on that first date two weeks ago, despite feeling assured that she had a million better things to do. She had an art show coming up next week. The Dirty Lemons were going to be playing at the 9.30 club on Friday. The diverse city grant was due tonight and he is pretty sure she had been meaning to apply.

Yet she makes Saul feel comfortable in needing a human connection, she makes him feel worthy of it. She scrunches her eyes together as if forcing her brain to think of another word for the pipes that ran under small side roads, just as a Kodaline song started to seep out the speakers on his night stand.

So you brought out the best of me, A part of me I’ve never seen. You took my soul and wiped it clean. Our love was made for movie screens.

Saul feels an unusual overwhelming poignancy in the moment; so full of meaning as to seem fake. Yet encouraged by her openness, Saul forces himself to not over-intellectualize the moment and wade into the youthful buoyance of it. Both Saul and Angela smile as he leans back for a second and mouths the words:

But if you loved me Why’d you leave me? Take my body, Take my body. All I want is, And all I need is To find somebody. I’ll find somebody.

He isn’t singing the words to her, not really, but the effect is the same. Angela takes in a deep stuttering breathe to steady herself. Saul begins to sway gently as the song continues, his knees softly pressing against hers as he keeps the beat. Each causal touch feels almost like an embrace, and both Angela and Saul could feel their heartbeats building faster than the tempo. Saul smiles a slightly cocky smile that he has no faith in, which Angela correctly presumes is full of the same mixture of heady emotional longing and fear and uncertainty that she herself feels.

“Yeah, a drainage pipe” Saul begins again as the song lingers on in the background. “It was one of those old country roads. When spring came, we’d have these giant rain storms. I remember loving the feeling of the pressure changing in the air. It felt like the whole world has building to something it couldn’t contain. Then there would be a flash of lightning and thunder that seemed to shake the ground and the sky seemed to overflow with water. Inches of rain every hour would come pouring from the sky like a dam had burst in heaven. It was moment that I wanted to last forever, and sometimes I feel like…”

“Weren’t you scared,” Angela interjected, breaking herself momentarily from his story “how old were you?”

“I was terrified, maybe like 10 or 11, but also excited, anxious and…”

“…That’s a good question…around, I imagine. Anyway, we used to build a dam around this drainage pipe. We would stack shovels full dirt until it was taller than I was. We would race to see if we could build a little temporary pond. I remember once, during a particularly bad storm, asking my brother if we could build the dam all the way to the sky and if we did what he thought we’d find there. He would smile and say, ‘the only thing that can stop you is your fear of heights kid, the land above the clouds is where your dreams lay waiting for you jump up and claim them…’”

“Your brother said that?” Angela asks.

“It was something my father used to say to him when was my age, I mean, when he was the age I was then.” Saul replies nearly absent mindedly, watching droplets fall from the tress, the last remnants of the summer squall that was now heading out over Virginia.

Saul sat with that memory for a moment, staring off into the window, half mesmerized by the droplets racing down while the other half of his mind wonders why that memory feels so pressing. Angela is too wrapped up in the story to let Saul ruminate on it for long.

“And your parents just let you guys do this?” Angela says, clearly enthralled with the story. Saul smiles at her concern for the safety of his younger self.

“In my head, I spent most of my childhood roaming the country side with my siblings but, yeah, I think my parents must have been around. They were pretty attentive parents, just not as interesting to me as my siblings.”

“Were you the Black Huck Finn?”

“What?”

“Running through the rustic country side, exploring the world with your best friend, bucking civilization for some nascent sense of the great beyond?”

“I’m not sure the story works if Huck Finn is Black…”

Angela laughs a hearty, full bodied laugh, and slides a strand of her long dark hair behind her ear again. Still smiling, they lock eyes.

“You know what I mean…”

“Yeah, when I was younger, I always felt pulled by a subtle but lingering sense of wanting more out of life; a desire to journey halfcocked at a whim. I always wanted to carry things over the edge and see a…something different…something new…a world beyond my own.”

“Over the edge?”

“Yeah. You know. See what was over the next hill. Take the next left instead of right and just ride off into the sunset. When I was a kid I would extend my ride home from school by hours, taking each route. By the time I went to college I knew every inch of the countryside by my house…But… I’m far too practical or practiced and methodic for that now. I have list of things to do, things to finish, things that keep me firmly here, with my feet on the ground…”

Saul’s words trail off as he suddenly realizes how much he misses that part of himself. He misses being the daring young child, fascinated by dreams of what lay beyond horizons. The world, his world, had seemed much larger then. He finds himself wondering what had pushed him from a budding cartographer to professional list maker.

There is another pregnant pause full of half knowing glances. Angela let’s Saul words sink into both her mind and into the room. She reaches out and places her hand on his arm gently, intuiting that he had inadvertently gotten himself lost in the past. They lock eyes as her warm knowing smile opens up a little space for him to process and just be.

Saul takes a shallow, quick breath and stares into Angela’s eyes for a few long and solid moments while slowly beginning to feel a their shared warmth and a new confidence. There is still a tension in the air, and shared anxiety and nervousness, all of which Saul decides, at last, to ignore.

He feels the pressure in the room build as he holds her gaze. Her clear dark amber eyes reminds him of the late afternoon sun breaking through storm clouds. He wants to say something. He wants to harness the courage of his younger self. He wants to push the moment over the edge. Saul wants to make the sky break open and rain. He wants so much but it’s been so long since he’s felt this way that he is unsure what to do next.

“Can I kiss you?” She asks him.

Saul begins to lean in even before he has fully registered the question. As their lips touch, out of practice, he is in a daze, in unfamiliar territory. The pressure that had been building becomes uncomfortable, like the room can’t hold it all. They break and Saul resists the urge to touch his lips and is left with a lingering sense of disbelief. Like an anxious man wondering if he locked the door to his house, Saul replays the moment to himself several times while staring into Angela’s eyes.

She laughs nervously and anxiously to break a bit of tension. She leans into it and him, resting her head on his shoulder and breathing audibly as if she has opened a pressure value. Saul comes-to slowly. He breathes deeply as he struggles to get on top of all the unexpected emotions he feels abruptly surging inside of him; joy and elation and desire mixed with a fear of the unknown and embarrassment at his detachment.

More expectant moments come that wash away bits of stress with each breath. Soon, the pressure of the room begins to equalize and Saul wraps his weightless arm around her. Angela slowly wraps her arm around his waist, and settles for a moment, peering out the second story window watching droplets of rain race down.

The moment nears a certain perfection, a symmetry that Saul is finally too fully immersed in to make a mental note of. Angela loses the world in the moment and finds herself with alone in the microverse they have created.

A rare sense of shared energy fills the room and suddenly everything was possible.

After a minute, Angela sits up and straightens her back. She looks at Saul and smiles warmly. They sit in the calm as their hearts beat steady synergetic thumps in tandem. Their breathing calms slowly. The weight of the moment is still there, but the room stable. As Saul’s mind clears he is left with that unfamiliar feeling of wanting more; of wanting to lean in and feel what happens when the pressure breaks. He imagines himself leaning in for another kiss, sense its possible completion of the moment so vividly but habit forces hesitation and he says “that was…yeah.”

Angela beams a soft smile of both disappointment and also a relief that surprises her. She turns to watching the droplets race down the window sill for a moment, breathing in step with Saul, letting the pressure build again.

“As a young girl,” She begins in an anxious tone, as if she is starting the story in an attempt to relieve the immensity in the air, “I used to wander the woods behind my aunt and uncle’s house. There was a trail that went from their back door to this pond. It seemed massive to me as a kid but it was probably only 40 feet across. After a rain storm, the pond would over flow and there would be a million little streams that would begin to flow from it. I used to run along the streams to see where the water ended up. I’d get to where one stream ended in a little puddle and then run back to the pond to find another stream I could follow. I used to think that I could follow them all to end. I’d be running all afternoon in the damp woods, until it was too dark to see the streams anymore. Then I’d vow to come back the next day…”

Angela stops in mid-sentence and her demeanor changes as if she suddenly recognizes why she is telling this particular story. Instead of finishing, she stares off through the window. Saul sees the sorrow and disappointment in her eyes and waits for her to continue while slowly rubbing her back. She expects Saul to make a joke, to laugh away the awkwardness of her tangent. Yet he stares intently into her eyes, waiting for her speak. It displays intensity and focus that makes the moment more intimate than she is prepared for. She feels herself exposed and vulnerable but safe and confident as the tension blossoms haphazardly in the silences.

“You can only take so many paths…”

“I’m taking the job in New York,” she says curtly, ended the conversation with a sense of finality that surprises them both.

There is a flash of pain and regret in Saul’s eyes and his mouth stays open briefly as the unfinished sentence tumbles from his mouth unsaid. Closing it, he forces his mouth into a smile.

“Congrats. It seems like the perfect job.” Saul’s face takes longer than he wants to soften from regret to sincerity, “I’m really happy for you.”

Saul is uncertain if all this building tension would end in relief or if he would be carried away by the torrent. Yet he still finds himself wanting more. Saul wants to pierce the tension that is building with the rise and fall of their chests but isn’t sure if he can handle what comes after.

Angela recognizes the panic and uncertainty filling Saul’s face. She leans in and gently runs her fingers through his dreadlocks almost as if she is absent mindedly trying to calm herself along with him. Saul responds by wrapping his arms around her waist and lets his would-be lover hold him. With his ear pressed gently over her chest, Saul thinks he could hear another slab of mud being added to dam holding back their emotions. He listens to the bricks being laid in their shared silence, building themselves higher, haphazardly towards the sky and beyond.

Saul begins to wonder whether this night is the start or end of something new. He wants to check his watch, to find some measure of certainty and control in the squall. He begins to understand how vulnerable he is being held by the smaller woman. Part of him remembers that this level of intimacy on a second date is dangerous.

He can sense that he is teetering on top of a towering structure built in haste for an unsound reason. He feels partly foolish for letting this much pressure grow. Yet most of him, including the part of his soul that feels connected to Angela’s, even that the part of him that knows such connections are rare but not unique, wants to push back the feelings of vertigo and leap.

So he decides to embrace the uncertainty and the fear and jump into the moment. Saul looks up into Angela’s eyes for another endless second before leaning in to kiss her again. Saul remains slightly detached from the moment for a few seconds, lips still unpracticed, still not sure the moment is real. Remembering something of his former self, he decides to close his eyes and lean into the curve. The gently pecking punctuated by bits of nervous laughter quickly build into a torrent of passion. Angela senses Saul’s passion and reciprocates, kissing him more fervently.

Saul lets himself go as he forgets his laundry lists of concerns, tasks and anxieties. The tension slides from dangerous ambiguity to excitement and elation. With each kiss, each caress, an unchecked task fell from his back and lands on the dam that had been building. Saul can feel the structure cresting in the sky just as the gravity of the instant began to crack it.

Angela feels hope growing in the pit of her stomach. The promise of something new, something magical was stirring and racing its way to her brain. The sensations were using her spine, strong and proud and now tingling with sensations, like an elevator shaft. Just before the sensation reaches her brain, just before she recognizes its purpose and communicates it to Saul in their shared languages of kisses and silences she is reminded of the 8 am plane flight that needs booking, of the empty boxes in her apartment that need filling, the good-bye’s letters to finish, thank you notes to sign. She remembers all of the started things that need finishing, the tasks that this dam of emotions they were constructing would not let her complete; the future she was planning that would swept away when the levees failed.

Angela stops, stiffens, and gently pushes Saul off of her just as Saul feels the last bit of stress fall and land on the embankment, shattering it under its own weight. The emotional release should have felt climatic but the distance between them makes it overwhelming. Saul moves away slowly but decisively, now trying to stop himself from being swept away.

They sit in muddled silence now. Saul slowly rubs Angela’s back in a daze as they both catch their breath. Saul tries to read the silence through the torrent of emotions flowing through him. He tries to understand it and her while fighting back a bitter-sweet joy. Each breath is filled with the sweetened remnants of intense satisfaction and the smoky tinge of disappointment. But the language of silence they had shared is gone, and in its place the laundry list of tasks and little anxieties begin to return.

“I just…It always happens like this. We can only follow one path at a time and only so many paths before…before…” She tries to explain, though the words sound dull and incomplete to her.

Saul hears her, nods, and continues to rub her back without really comprehending. The emotional world that their caresses had contained came flooding back in, incomprehensible to him. Sounds and thoughts and plans rushed in and mixed with the joy and ineffable sense of loss too quickly for either of them to decipher. The feeling of standing on top of the unfinished rampart, so close to the sky; a feeling that had been so real just a moment ago that it could only be communicated in silence, was distant and hazy and half formed. As the time passed slowly, he began to wonder if any of it had been real. He only knows he feels the undeniable sense of wanting more.

“How tall did your dams get?” She asks.

“When I was I kid?” Saul responds, remembering the moment when he stood so high on the mound of wet dirt that he seemed to tower over his older siblings. He remembers thinking he could have seen across the entire prairie if the rain hadn’t obscured his line of sight. The feeling of power and certainty felt so visceral and alien and welcomed to him in this moment.

“Unbelievably high” he answers wistfully, happy to be focusing on anything but the present moment “higher than I ever thought I was capable of. Higher than I’ve ever been since….”

Saul laughs, upon hearing himself speak, yet never had a hyperbole rang so true.

“Maybe 5 feet once or twice, but it felt like miles” he admits, “when was the last time you followed the paths behind your aunt’s house?”

Angela smiles, watches the last rain drops trickle down the window and says, as if to herself, “Is that not what I’m doing now?”

The silence that follows is hollow and filled with the remnant emotions of opportunities aborted. Their hearts both beat quickly and in time with their own breathes but no longer in time with each other’s. Now each out of step breath seems cheap and appears to be pushing them apart.

Eventually, Saul and Angela wade through the water logged remnants of their earth worked dam as he walks her to the door. They mumble lies about seeing each other before she leaves and Angela tries to summon up the words to say they should get together again the next times it rains. Instead she leans in, kissing Saul one last time on the lips, and tries to press as much meaning into it as possible.

She tries to tell him how much she wishes she could follow his love till it ran out. She tries to tell him that New York is a short trip away. She tries to tell him that this night meant more to her than the list of to-do’s that forced it to end prematurely. She tries to tell him how badly she wants to jump beyond with him. She tries to impress her new found need for the previous emotional excellence. Yet, as she opens her eyes and they lock with his she sees no sign of comprehension.

As he closed the door behind her, Saul unconsciously felt his lips, feeling like she had left a message on them in braille. Yet his fingers and hands and arms were too heavy and clumsy to decipher it now. He watches her walk away slowly, breathlessly and aimlessly to her car. Then, staring at the broken levees at his feet, the piles of clutter around his house, and remembering the laundry on his bed, Saul began to plan.

The rain drops falling on the window remind him of his younger self. He remembers the feeling of wanting more. The feeling of her lips on his gives him the courage to ask for it, even if her message failed to deliver. He begins to pick up the clutter strewn around the room, making expansive plans for the future as he cleans.

Buy the laundry detergent that makes his cotton shirts feel like silk across his skin.
Clean his bedsheets of the remnants of the night’s mud so that he can awaken afresh in the morning.
Vacuum the dirt off the carpet so that he can feel the soft wispy fabric between his toes.
Buy peaches from the farmer’s markets, sweet like the late summer night, and share them with Karen.
Write a vision statement for my work that ensures I’m heading towards the light and not just fighting back the darkness
Re-write work plan to fit vision statement so that I can feel rejuvenated by my daily work
Write a short story about the tower of Babel
Write a novel about my vision for Black Liberation
Write more poems about melted kisses
Tell her I loved that moment in the sky when I felt closer to an unknown god than ever before
Learn to get better at saying goodbyes
Find Reasons to go the New York.
Fall in Love again.

Illogic

the physics of nonsense and non-compliance:
radical action in the forefront

or
meager meandering of an eager and creative soul child
or
streams of neon-neurotic non-neo-liberal consciousness
or
things mother forgot to remind me
or
things I think of in between the oppressions
or
the science of living
or

If, as they say, E=MC2
then would ODB and Jay-Z squared off
freestyling in the market place of ideas
make matter reverberate off the window you forgot to put down in the rain storm?
Would your room be flooded with the 2 cents of disaffected black youth?
Could you handle all that realness?
Would the curvature of time-space triangulate slowly if Lauryn sung the hook?
If it got loud enough would it scare the birds in the bush worth the gander with the one Black swan?
Would your investment in bird watching books be squandered?
If, as the world turned faster the days our lives got longer
until a year became the infinity between the end of your first kiss and your eyes opening
would time still equal money?
What if we all woke tomorrow and decided that it would be Sunday
every day,
would we ever get our mail?
Would the mail-man,
mail-people,
persons,
zers be forced to work on sunday?
Would the injustices of the world perpetuate themselves in our own lackadaisical heaven?
Does liberation come with Paid Sick Days?
Does the revolution take water breaks?
Will the water be our grandmother’s lead lined tap water?
What if “Alf” was just an anachronistic prophesy of Clintonian democracy?
How much wood would a wood chuck need to chuck for Chuck and Heavey D to stop the violence?
If our best educated, best prepared, best equipped refuse to fight then when does the battle start?

What if we all got into a room and talked it out?
What if only the respectable folks could hold the mic?
What if I told her I loved her?
What if we all got along, all the time, all the time and love was everywhere?
Would we have room for our beds?
Would we have to sleep,
huddled in our happiness,
peaceful in our orgies because
fucking is the opposite of war?
Maybe the world is just too much.
Maybe we just can’t handle it all?
Maybe the revolution will just turn off the lights
Maybe we will spend our lives on our backs,
staring at the stars at night,
holding hands and signing hyms
praising how simple,
how beautiful,
how lovely it all is when take the time to look at it?
Maybe heaven is a world only perceived through our eyes and ears.
Maybe it just beauty without context.
Maybe this hell is being beaten with false histories.
Maybe death is the daily monotony of work and existing with our blinders force feeding us information and life is everything else…

I was reminded today that there is no cosmic scale weighing the oppression of Blacks in America.
There is no ledger listing the wrongs that have been done to us.
There is no mystic reckoning that will bring wholeness.
There is no justice in this world beyond that which we make.
Power concedes nothing without demand and I fear it will be a long time before our demands are met with anything but violence.
So I will no longer allow my life to be defined merely by struggle or pain.
If we are to walk to Calvary like Sisyphus,
bearing our cross up this racial mountain only to have out feet taken from under us
Or if we must continue to build national idols to freedom that mock our bondage
I will love each and everyone who bears these thorns and stones with me.
I will love each and everyone who feels my pain.
I will love each and everyone who wishes this death march to end.
I will love, despite all my pain, because it is only while experiencing love that I feel truly human.
I will love, despite all my rage, because it is the most radical political act I can convenience of.

There is a feeling of empowerment one feels when you realize that you have made the conscious decision to live. Few people ever get to experience that feeling but I’d be hard pressured to call myself lucky to be one of them. I remember standing on top of tall building overlooking the courtyard of my college. I remember thinking how easy it would be to step off. I imagined feeling the wind flow over my body for a few seconds that would seem an eternity. I remember thinking it would be so quick, so easy. I had battled suicidal thoughts before, but never had the thought of ending it seem so easy. I chose then to live, or many reason I have talked about before. I made the conscious decision to continue living.

This moment, in retrospect, was a watershed moment in my battle with mental illness. It was a moment, a memory, that shepherded me through the darkness. It reminded me, when the would seemed cruel and pointless, chaotic and thoroughly beyond my control, that I at least had chosen to continue living it. I recognize now, as I did then, that it is in many ways a false choice. Living is all I know. Equally important, it was not in reality, that choice that made the pain bearable. It was the perspective that narrative gave me. I constructed a narrative that gave me power and I used that power heal myself. Time and hours of self care later, the teenager who stood on the roof top feels like another person.

Earlier this month, I was reminded of that boy again. I was walking away from a massive protest, one that I had been waiting for for weeks. I was filled with rage. The tinge of injustice pulsed through my vein with such force that I felt on fire. I wanted to scream, to shout, to break, to shatter the world in a vain attempt to ease the pain. My hands started to tingle as I balled them into fists. My body tensed with a desire to fight something concrete, something physical, something as visceral as my despair. I have learned over the years that little good comes from such rage left unchecked. It must be processed rather than merely released. So, I made the decision to leave and take care of my own emotional health. As I was walking away, I caught the eye of good friend who smiled and waved. I did not wave back. I did not, and do not, feel bad about not waving back.

In that moment, I saw a cold dark path open up before me. A path in which I could cast off my connections with the world in order to limit my accountability to it. I could embrace hate and welcome the solitude that it would bring. You can only be wronged by a society if you accept the premise that you need to be part of it. It would be so easy to walk away from that idea. I was tired of holding in my emotions, of processing them, and analyzing and checking them before I shared them or fear of the response. I just wanted to rage. I’m not talking about just rioting. Rioting is a way to communicate something you can’t verbalize or refuse to process. Rioting is the language of the unheard. It is the way we communicate to a society that otherwise ignores us. I’m talking about giving in to the part of me with no concern for justice. The part of me with no need to heard by jury becuase it doesn’t have any stock in the idea of peers. It’s part of me that I like to pretend isn’t there. The part of me that wanted to stop thinking, that wanted to succumb to the apathy and give up the moral complexity of being human. Give up building relationship with people who may hurt you and disappoint you. Give up with building empathy with people who will be hurt, or striving for an inclusive community, all for a break from being restrained by a concern for building a tomorrow.

In that moment, I choose love.

I didn’t choose it because it was easy. I didn’t chose it because it sounded nice, and soft and familiar. I chose love because I knew that hate or apathy would tear me apart. I knew the unbearable weight of it all would crush me if I was full of hate.

Hate just isn’t not strong enough until it destroys you.

I knew that the only part of life I have ever found worth living were the connections I made with other people. I knew, that all I really wanted was to not be alone in my pain anymore. I knew that for all my rage, for all of my politics, I want America to want me. It’s a hellish false choice, but I knew that in choosing hate I would be the demon they think I am.

In choosing love, I stepped back from the ledge. I chose to take responsibility to help change the world. I choose to love this nation that hates me, not for my slice of the America dream or out of some Obamaesque vision of the American family. I choose to love this nation because as James Baldwin said “We are here and to be here means that we can’t be anywhere else.” I had to love America because America is where I find myself. Loving America (as a community of people not a patriarchal nation state) is a messy, inelegant solution but it is best I’ve got. I have no other home.

I choose to love my fellow humans, to feel their pain as my pain, to feel their injustice as my injustice because in that love I am elevated. In that love I am able to transcend some of the pain. In that love I can laugh. In that love I can create, and learn, and grow. In that love I can hope. In that love the pain doesn’t go away completely. In that love their hate isn’t vanquished. The oppression doesn’t cease. The killings don’t stop. But in that love when I articulate my humanity loved ones validate me by articulating theirs and suddenly it all feels worth it.

It is, I know, ultimately a false choice. One made out of a need to survive this with some measure of my humanity in tact. But it is the narrative that I choose to arm myself with. My love is not magical. But like that moment when I decided to live, this narrative, my love, is powerful. That power is transformative. It gives me the ability to continue on. It gives me to power to stand to those who seek to set themselves above me. It gives me to power to speak truth to power and not concede an inch for half measures and compromise. It gives me the fuel to carry on, watering the seeds of justice planted before my. It gives me the clarity to take the time to plant my own. Love gives me the perspective to hope that one day, when we reach the mountain top, we will not be sent tumbling down, with nothing but our cross to break the fall. Maybe this narrative with be replaced later. Maybe time will change my tune. But for now, in this moment. I will love. I will love, despite the pain, because it is only through the experience of loving that I have ever felt truly human. I will love, despite my rage, because it is the most politically radical act I can conceive of.

We will love and support one another

We have nothing to lose but our chains”

We did not create our Blackness. It was imposed upon us . But we accepted it, and made it beautiful and now we love it.

Why is it so hard for them to do the same?

There is a part of me,
underneath the indignation and the pride,
beneath the bluster and the argument,
under the fight and the grit and the rhetoric,
that worries that this is just
lunacy.

That I am standing in the darkness
A lonesome, solitary figure,
howling half baked conspiracies
to world of disinterested strangers
Like a hermit listing his litany indignation at the moon.
I stand in this depressed darkness,
Worrying that the illness I battled back for years,
The madness that used to bounce off the cavernous walls of my skull
The ineffable, nervous insanity,
is growing inside me,
constantly pushing back against the brick walls of apathy–
barriers built of traumatic tuned gut reactions —
constructed over the years to keep the recklessness at bay.

Any moment I feel that I might slip,
Unknowingly,
Uncontrollably,
Sweetly…
Into the succulent abyss of psychosis.

I dread the moment when dementia is inseparable from reality
while simultaneously yearning for its sweet ecstasy.
Yearning for the warm, nearly maternal comfort of diagnosis
because I have much other fears too.

Deeper,
Dimmer,
defused fears that grow in the unexamined emptiness of my subconscious
terrors that haunt the primordial recess at the core of my being:
the depths where emotions are felt in the body.

Fears that I’m afraid might shatter me if I examined them in the light.

There,
unfathomably submerged,
unarticulated, and unsated,
I am paralyzed by the fear that I’m not crazy.
That it’s the world that is psychotic.
That it’s the world that is nearly nonsensical,
fueled by a cruel and only occasionally perceptible illogic
composed of massive structural mysteries beyond my comprehension.

I fear that my traumatic recoil is the safest reaction.

I fear that truly engaging in or with the world would burn away my soul
Leaving me the hallow shell of another Black boy torn asunder,Burned by the unbearable Whiteness of it all.

There is a part of me that hopes,
beyond my hopes for peace and revolution,
beyond my dreams for family and love,
beyond needs for water and food-
a primal screaming visceral, ineffable, unsatisfied part of me-
wishes that I’m overreacting.

That the Whiteness is non malignant.
That these stares, and statements and statues are isolated coincidences
brought together by the misanthropic meanderings of an overly defensive mind.
That I’m overly sensitive to it all.
That 36 million Black bodies do not riel in this torture chamber called America
where Micro aggressions drip daily,
without rhythm or consistently discernible logic
onto our blood soaked foreheads

slowly

drip by drip

driving all of us,
collectively
stark raving mad.
I pray to every god I’ve ever known, every night that everyone of us is not shucking and jiving on the razor thin edge of white racial sensibilities hoping that enough of our culture drips from their lips as they consume us to be able to feed our children.

What God could have created a scale capable of weighing this much injustice? What Divine metals could withstand the sheer tonnage of my oppression?

It is impossible.
I must be crazy.
I must have overacted.
I must apologize.

I must make amends
dance on the tip of their fragility
pretending that I like the music;
that the room is not built of bones of former slaves
thrown,
in chains,
into the ocean for insurrection.

Pretend that what I’m hearing is really music
not a cacophony of beigeness
whisperingnigger, nigger, nigger, nigger
so melodically that I think its my name…

Statcounter

Two weeks ago Omolara Williams McCallister and I spoke at a regional UU conference at All Soul’s that was centered around Black Lives Mater and racial justice. Also speaking that day was Alonzo Smith who is a professor of Black history. I decided to turn our talks into a podcast but unfortunately have been super … Continue reading Emerging Analysis, Relation […]

ASK YOURSELF! Am I A Nigger? Am I A Nigger? Am I A Nigger? And if the answer is yes? Don’t be afraid to show it! Cause it’s the Nigger in you that makes you BLACK! …Once you learn to hate it… An acoustic dialogue on respectability politics, the diversity of Black self … Continue reading Am […]